Aside from powering some of this holiday season’s most
impressive games and providing playback of high-definition movies, the Cell Broadband
Engine is also exceptionally adept at medical and scientific applications
requiring massive amounts of floating-point computational power.

Since joining Stanford University’s Folding@home
program in March, the PlayStation 3 has led
all processors in sheer productivity numbers.
It should come as no surprise that Sony announced this week that PlayStation 3
consoles all over the world have helped the Folding@home project to reach a
petaflop, a milestone never before reached on a distributed computing network.

"The recent inclusion of PS3 as part of the Folding@home program has
afforded our research group with computing power that goes far beyond what we
initially hoped," said Vijay Pande, Associate Professor of Chemistry at
Stanford University and Folding@home project lead. "Thanks to PS3, we are
now essentially able to fast-forward several aspects of our research by a
decade, which will greatly help us make more discoveries and advancements in
our studies of several different diseases."

"When we introduced PS3, we knew its incredible processing power would
allow for a great deal of innovation and creativity," said Jack Tretton,
president and CEO of SCEA. "It's extremely rewarding to see that the
scientific community has found a way to harness PS3 technology for humanitarian
purposes and we continue to be amazed at what gamers and the Folding@home
community have been able to accomplish in such a short amount of time."

The Folding@home program runs simulations in protein folding, helping
scientists understand – and hopefully curing – diseases such as Alzheimer's,
Parkinson's and certain forms of cancer. That’s not all the PS3’s CPU is able
to do for the medical community, though, as the Cell Broadband Engine is also helping doctors at
Mayo Clinic with medical imaging.

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I thought the PS3 basically trounced even higher-end GPUs from both ATI and Nvidia.

Then again, I think I also remember reading something convoluted basically saying that the PS3s numbers were inflated because it was only assigned certain types of F@H threads because the hardware was so specialized...ah, hell, I don't even know.

No NVidia cards are supported that I know of, and the only "high-end" ATI cards supported are the 1900's; nothing in the 2-series yet.

But on that note, using only ATI's older cards cards:

quote: When it comes to pure performance though, the PS3’s Cell Broadband Processor is still no match for ATI GPUs for protein folding. The GPUs on Folding@home sit at 41 current TFLOPS, which come from only 700 processors. If there were as many GPUs folding as there are PS3s on the network, it can be extrapolated that GPUs could reach 876 TFLOPS.

Stole that from the "led all processors" link of the article above. At the time, the PS3 did 367 TFLOPS over 14971 active processors.

No, per-unit GPUs still outclass PS3s. High-end GPUs are the basis for massive stream processing, after all. The highly-parallel architectures are far more aptly suited for this sort of number crunching than even the Cell processor. That being said, on a per-watt basis, the Cell probably beats out GPUs. Take an X1950~, though, and it would trounce a PS3 in overall performance in terms of F@H and several other applications.

Precisely. As per the most recent stats, it takes about 17 GPUs to provide 1 TFLOP of folding performance, while it takes about 40 Cell processors to reach that same performance level. That being said, there are about 35,000 PS3s actively folding, which is in stark contrast to the 737 GPU users. As a result, over three-quarters of the entire network performance of the F@H project is directly related to the PS3. Not too shabby.

It's important to note that the x86 CPUs can do the most broad kinds of work. The PS3s can't do quite as much, but what they can do, they can do much faster than an x86 CPU.

Graphics cards are another step in that direction. Their abilities are even more limited in the types of calculations they can perform. However, they are even faster than the PS3s at performing those calculations.

So there are reasons to use all three in the F@H program. Your x86 CPUs are still very valuable.

quote: What type of calculations the PS3 client is capable of running? The PS3 right now runs what are called implicit solvation calculations, including some simple ones (sigmodal dependent dielectric) and some more sophisticated ones (AGBNP, a type of Generalized Born method from Prof. Ron Levy's group at Rutgers). In this respect, the PS3 client is much like our GPU client. However, the PS3 client is more flexible, in that it can also run explicit solvent calculations as well, although not at the same speed increase relative to PC's. We are working to increase the speed of explicit solvent on the PS3 and would then run these calculations on the PS3 as well. In a nutshell, the PS3 takes the middle ground between GPU's (extreme speed, but at limited types of WU's) and CPU's (less speed, but more flexibility in types of WU's) .

quote: it's just a matter of how much time you need to accomplish that.

And with that disclaimer, you've given part of the reason why the PS3 is less versatile for FAH calculations than a standard CPU. GPU's are even less versatile than the PS3.A Pentium mmx rig is a Turing machine, but that doesn't mean it is FAH-capable.The CPU client can perform all types of FAH calculations, while the PS3 is more limited, and the mighty GPU client is very much architecturally restricted in the types of FAH calculations it can perform... subtle arguments aside.

Discussions at FAH go into greater detail as to why the GPU and PS3 clients are limited in scope, despite their awesome power.